But none came.
He led them into the Aureate Hall with its albino trees, and then right up to the huge basilica entrance, where he paused, the space now a heavy blackness, the tiny windows high up around the base of the dome admitting virtually no light.
“This takes me back,” said Naomi softly, stepping up alongside him. “Seems larger, however, than the new one.”
“Everything about this place is bigger and tougher.” He rubbed at the wet nape of his neck. “The Gauntlet is more challenging, too.”
“Tell me about it,” she commanded, stepping into the massive room and leading the way forward.
So he did. He described the three blades and how they dove past them, and then the chamber beyond with its twelve statues.
Naomi paused by the first undamaged bier to run her hand over its jeweled surface.
Scorio blinked rapidly, rubbing his hand down the side of his hip as he turned in a slow circle, dragging his night vision across the great expanse. “We decided that the best approach was to charge the main aggressor all at once and take it out, and then have two of us tackle any flankers while the third went for any ranged attackers. But each time we faced a different enemy configuration, and had to change our plans on the fly.”
“Mmhmm,” said Naomi, moving past the biers to stop at last before the ancient Archspire. She reached out to touch its base with a thoughtful air, then drew her hand back rapidly.
“What?” asked Scorio, resisting the urge to check the exits again.
“There’s a strong mana current moving through it,” she said, backing away and looking up at its half-shorn height.
“There is?” He stepped up beside her. “But it’s broken.”
“Broken but not dead. And not just Coal mana, either. I sensed…” She shook her head. “Suffice to say it was powerful and beyond my ability to parse.”
Scorio studied the brutal lower half of the Archspire, then considered the part that lay smashed across some fifty biers. “What does it mean?”
Naomi cleared her throat. “I don’t know.”
“Can we… harvest that mana, somehow?”
To which she just turned to stare at him, eyebrow raised.
“What?” he asked. “We’re on a quest to get better than Coal, right? And if the Archspire here has high-quality mana going to waste…?”
“You’re welcome to try,” she said dryly. “But while I can sense it, it’s protected, sheathed within the Archspire proper.”
Scorio nodded. “Ah well. It was just a thought.”
Naomi turned and walked to the closest undamaged bier. Bending down, she considered the activation crystal, then ran her hand over its beveled edge. “You sure you want to go back in there?”
“You’re still asking me? After we’ve come all this way?”
“Pro forma. Find your own bier, then. Let’s get this done.”
He did so, and as the crystal came to life, he felt a fluttering in his stomach and had to resist the urge to rub his hands together. He was going into the Gauntlet with Naomi. An Emberling.
How far would they get?
He hopped up onto the bier and saw that she was already lying upon her own.
Lying back, he stared straight up into the gloom, waiting for the darkness to take him.
The statues, he was sure, wouldn’t stand a chance.
Chapter 34
Scorio awoke in the tomb of battered copper and immediately sprang up to his feet. Sweeping the dense Coal mana into his Heart, he ignited and leaped, clearing the brim of the hole above with ease, catapulting himself out to land in a crouch.
The vast beam of lucid, burning light burned in the distance as always. The three walls of impossibly smooth iron, bifurcated by ever-narrower gaps. The raw, surging rock that rose from the ground like rough ocean waves frozen in time.
Familiar, eerie, vast, and still capable of instilling in his chest a sense of awe.
Naomi sprang out of another tomb off to his left, making it look easy. She landed lightly on her feet, fully erect, and began walking forward as if nothing strange had just happened.
Scorio strode forward to join her, and together they navigated the rough floor toward the great burning light.
“How long has it been since this Gauntlet was used?” she murmured, but he could tell the question was rhetorical. “It’s a miracle that it’s still here. Still operable.”
“Mostly,” said Scorio, voice hushed. “Lianshi thinks this decay is part of the process of collapse. The way the pain lingers, long after we awaken from death, another symptom of its corruption.”
“Perhaps in time we’d awaken with the wounds only partially healed,” mused Naomi, rounding the rough ridge of one upswept mass of raw rock.
“I love your choice of comforting imagery,” said Scorio. “It warms the heart and makes the future seem pleasant and enjoyable.”
“The future is nothing but pain and disappointment,” said Naomi distractedly, gazing into the shadows. “Much like the Gauntlet. But let’s see how far we can get.”
“You never tried the original,” remembered Scorio. “I’d forgotten.”
“A first time for everything.” She lightly padded one fist into the palm of her other hand. “Can’t say I’m not curious.”
“This one’s more difficult, as I said. However well you do here, you’d do much better in the new one.”
“I’m an Emberling,” she replied. “At my rank, we’re expected to make it past the tenth room. Try to keep up.”
Scorio lowered his chin and inhaled deeply. “You can count on that.”
They strode up to the burning blade, their forms seeming to melt away in its refulgent brilliance.
“We need to hit the room fast,” he said again, finding Naomi’s calm disconcerting. “Three blades, remember? The first sweeps down from the upper left—”
She turned and smiled at him. “I got it. Why don’t you go first?”
“First?” He blinked, then shrugged. “Sure. See you on the other side.”
“Good luck.”
Scorio took a few steps back. Was she excited? He’d never seen her this calm, this… pleasant. Putting the thought from his mind he took a deep breath, drank deep of the turgid Coal mana, and then sprinted forward.
Five steps and he launched himself into a dive. He aimed high, hands spearing into the light first, and then he was through.
As before the blade slid just under him as he leaped headfirst over its swing. He came down into a practiced roll, the chamber spinning all around him before he came up to his feet and leaped on the up bounce to land facing the entry wall, eager to witness Naomi’s arrival.
A large, curved black blade emerged from the wall, easily a foot long, its tip needle-sharp, its body organic and tapering to a segmented black tail that resembled nothing more than the vertebrae of the spine.
Despite himself, Scorio felt a chill at the eerie lethality of Naomi’s tail, but he couldn’t resist taking an urgent step forward. She wasn’t coming in fast enough. She was going to be—
Naomi’s Nightmare Lady form extruded itself from the gray wall, tall and ghastly, limbs elongated and lean, body emaciated and textured like highly buffed black leather. Her face emerged, horrific and alien, her gums stretched tight over her fangs, her brow backswept and elongated, twin horns flanking it, all of it wetly black as if freshly dipped in oil.
The scimitar materialized just as she stepped through and swept down at her, the stroke certain, vicious, aimed precisely to force her to sidestep into the path of the rapier.
Without looking up, her burning green eyes not even averting themselves from the far wall, Naomi—no, the Nightmare Lady—parried the downward sweep with a nonchalant flexion of her tail. Sparks flew from the impact of the two blades, and then the Nightmare Lady was through, never having changed her stride.